Pacman 2600 discussion page

[NE146]

Does anyone remember the "pre-release" commercial that Atari did for Pacman? I don't think you can find this commercial on youtube

 

Basically it showed a close up of the actual Pacman arcade game being played with Pacman going around the maze, etc. and a voice saying "This is Pacman. One of the biggest arcade hits today. And soon, you can play it on the Atari 2600!" (or something to that effect)

 

THAT's what threw me off. If it had just come out I think I would have felt "yeah this is the Atari version".. But since they showed the arcade game on their commercial to build up the hype, that made me think there was a possibility it could be closer.

Edited November 1, 2011 by NE146

[BigErn]

I am not old enough to have experienced it, but I imagine it must have been a let down to play 2600 Pac-Man after being used to the arcade. One of the most frustrating things for me was the joystick. Since all Atari sticks move in 8 directions, sometimes you end up pushing it at an angle and Pac-man will not make the turn. They should have made a rock-solid 4 directional Pac-Man controller. That would have been a pretty cool tie-in. I am surprised it does not exist considering how many aftermarket joysticks are available. I have a Plug 'n Play like that, and it's much more fun. Unfortunately, it does not save your high score.

 

I usually just play Ms. Pac Man on the 2600.

[Lord Helmet]

It was nothing like the arcade version, and they rushed it and released an unfinished prototype!

 

It wasn't an unfinished prototype.

[Rex Dart]

It wasn't an unfinished prototype.

 

If modern games can be called "unfinished" for needing patches or being otherwise unpolished, I would think VCS Pacman would qualify also.

[Lord Helmet]

It wasn't an unfinished prototype.

 

If modern games can be called "unfinished" for needing patches or being otherwise unpolished, I would think VCS Pacman would qualify also.

 

Todays games are shipped with the idea they can be patched...so they are known to be possibly unfinished. In the VCS days this wasn't the case. Pac-Man was considered finished when shipped.

[Rex Dart]

Not all of 'em. And they're all considered finished, that's why they're sold.

[JQW]

Here in the UK, the Atari Owners Club sent out a special promotional letter just to announce that PacMan was coming soon. The leaflet included a competition to design a PacMan badge. If I remember correctly, there were no screenshots, and no details as to when it would launch.

[retrorussell]

I actually thought it was okay. My sister and I had fun with it. Plenty of difficulty settings made it more interesting to us, and even on the hardest level we got pretty good at it.

[littleman jack]

I was very dissapointed when I first played it, but then eventually I accepted it for what it was, and played the heck out of it. It was Pac-Man for the 2600. At least we had something playable that had a little guy going around a maze eating lines, and we had a good laugh at the sound effects (bam-bam-bam-bam-bam). Once I played Pac-Man on the Atari 800 however, 2600 Pac-Man got very little time. I missed out on 2600 Ms. Pac-Man and Jr. Pac-Man until 2003. Those two games are excellent and I still play them often.

 

Every now and then I break out 2600 Pac-Man and play it on game 1 and on game 6. And every now and then I break out Nukey Shay's excellent 8k hack called Pac-Man 8k. That one takes the original 2600 Pac-Man to the next level, with proper colors, intermissions, better sound, and fruit instead of a square vitamin.

[Greg2600]

Atari should have capitalized on the success of their 2600 Ms. Pac-Man, and re-released Pac-Man using that "engine."

[Torr]

To this day I've never seen a coin-op Pac-Man game. 2600 Pac-Man IS Pac-Man to me. When I saw Pac-Man on the NES back in '88-'89, I thought THAT was the crazy version, 'cause the maze was so tall and skinny, but hey, the item in the middle is fruit and it changes every level... I thought that was something Nintendo did to spruce it up a bit, no joke.

 

nowadays I can see that VCS Pac-Man did not deliver the Arcade goods, but really, did any VCS game? Not to say they weren't fun, but pitting the VCS against a coin-op machine is like pitting my old Plymouth against an Indy car.

[retrorussell]

Seen this code before, but it doesn't seem to work for me. If anyone gets it to work, let me know.

 

On the first level, eat one ghost.

On the second level, eat two ghosts.

On the third level, eat three ghosts.

On the fourth level, eat four ghosts.

Now press Up, Down and Up.

Kill Pac-Man.

Now you should have infinite lives.

[cybercylon]

I thought it was okay.... disappointed with the look and the sound, but I didn't think it was that bad.

 

Had Pac-mac never existed, and this was simply some generic game from Atari, I doubt there would have been so much complaining.

[BassGuitari]

They should have made a rock-solid 4 directional Pac-Man controller. That would have been a pretty cool tie-in. I am surprised it does not exist considering how many aftermarket joysticks are available.

 

I'm pretty sure the Kraft Mazemaster joysticks have switchable 4- and 8-way modes.

 

The first time I played a 2600 was 1999, and one of the first games was Pac-Man. I didn't expect much graphically because...well...it's the Atari 2600. But my friends and I had a good time with it. I still like 2600 Pac-Man. It's probably better described as a Pac-Man clone, but it's still a fun game.

 

[opeygon]

Say what you want dude, but when we got Pac Man for the 2600, it was the shit. I know, it wasn't very close to the original in many ways, but it was close in a few important ways which I think are obvious and need not be listed here. Plus, this was Pac Man at home. I mean, how cool was that?!

 

So stop bagging on the old games Hacker! You have to look at these games through the eyes of those who knew nothing else of home video games. In that context, Pac Man was pretty dam cool at the time! I know it leaves a lot to be desired, but to bag on it today is totally unfair.

[IntellivisionDude]

I didn't have an Atari growing up, but a friend did and he had Pac Man. I knew it didn't look like the arcade but i just figured that was probably the best the 2600 could do. I liked it. It was more my speed. I sucked at the arcade and did just a little bit better on this.

It also has maybe my favorite video game sound effects. I don't know how many tv shows, movies, commercials would use the sounds from this game when somebody would be playing games off screen.

[Torr]

I don't know how many tv shows, movies, commercials would use the sounds from this game when somebody would be playing games off screen.

 

Between 2600 Pac-Man and 2600 Donkey Kong it's hard to say which was the more used "standard video game sound f/x" on TV shows/Movies back in the day more, and quite often they were used in conjunction with each other. Donkey Kong's footsteps/jumping sfx coupled with Pac-Man's sfx being the Game Start/Game Over sounds.

 

EDIT

But that's just a testament to how awesome yet simple those sound effects were. Anyone could hear Pac-Man's BOO-deep, BOO-boo as meaning the game is starting, Mario's footsteps and jumping sfx in DK were classic in interpreting action and then the sad sound when Pac-Man died just meant death/game over to anyone who heard it, even to someone who had never played the game before.

Edited November 7, 2011 by Torr

[Nukey Shay]

Not awesome...but commonplace (which is why they were used). Recognition is the key - those sounds were associated with video gaming.

 

BTW I'd say that DK's sounds were used more often.

[The Usotsuki]

I think I've heard Tetris used sometimes. Not sure if it's true for the original Japanese CardCaptor Sakura but in one episode of the English dub CardCaptors Kero's playing a video game and I swear it's the "Tetris!" sound from the GB version I hear.

[retrorussell]

Funny that in the karaoke version of Pac-Man Fever the 2600 version death sound effect can be heard.

[Noelio]

Hehe! It's funny this is mentioned tonight.

 

An hour or so ago I was messing with my mame cabinet and played good ol namco pac man. After a while I flipped over to stella and played the 2600 version.

I spent more time with the 2600 version for some reason. Can't place it really, it just seemed more fun even though the graphics and sound stink to high heaven.

 

As stated above, I have to agree that the gameplay is pretty good.

 

ET still rapes goat asses, however!

[pixelated]

Atari 2600 Pac-Man is certainly playable, but I really dislike it. The game would be okay if not for the later release of Ms. Pac-Man for the system, which puts Pac-Man to shame in comparison. Since I have both, guess which one I play most often, and which one I leave to gather dust?

[VectorGamer]

Being 41 years old, I grew up with video games in the arcade. I got a VCS around 1980 because of Atari's Space Invaders but you could play the games at a kiosk first so you knew before you bought that SI was an awesome game.

 

I never played Atari's Pac-Man before we bought it. I sat in the backseat of a Chevy Nova on the ride home from the store, opened the box and began reading the manual. I was confused when reading about "vitamins" & "wafers."

 

When I popped this game into the VCS for the first time, I felt like we had been ripped off. The audio effects suck, the mazes suck, the graphics suck, the colors suck, the box art sucks, the manual sucks and Atari sucks for releasing this garbage.

 

If you did not stand in line to play the arcade game, then you're missing a big part of the story as to why VCS Pac-Man sucks. If you were too young or weren't even born yet in 1980 to play Pac-Man in the arcade, most likely you won't get it - plain and simple.

Edited December 5, 2011 by rmaerz

[Chris Leach]

Pac-Man was not the game for me to play...I was more into playing baseball or that terrible football game I had as a kid....

 

Even though Pac-Man was a huge seller and my mom had to have it....I enjoyed showing my mom's high score for Pac-Man what was up when Atari released his Ms. Pac-Man...that game was well done for its time!

[jaybird3rd]

I think a lot of the angst and anger over 2600 Pac-Man is a bit of a "retcon", fueled by all of the people in the echo chamber of the Internet who have been bashing it (and poor E.T.) for years. Of course we can find flaws with it now, but most of us didn't feel that way at the time it came out. I didn't get to see Pac-Man in the arcade until much later, and perhaps my initial impressions might have been different if I had, but I remember playing a LOT of 2600 Pac-Man and having fun with it.

 

I suppose the differences of opinion are related to how one defines "bad" in the context of arcade ports: should a port be considered "bad" if it does not replicate the original game in every particular, even if it's possible to enjoy it on its own terms? My criteria are not so strict: even if I had seen the arcade version, I think I would have understood even at the time that certain tradeoffs were to be expected in creating home versions of arcade games (especially on a primitive machine like the 2600), and I don't think it would have prevented me from enjoying the 2600 version for what it was.

 

Comparisons to 2600 Ms. Pac-Man aren't entirely fair, either: Ms. Pac-Man had the benefit of twice the ROM space (which apparently wasn't an option with the original Pac-Man), it was released about a year later, and it sacrificed Pac-Man's two-player mode. Why didn't Atari "retrofit" the original Pac-Man with the technology developed for Ms. Pac-Man? One reason I can think of is that Ms. Pac-Man was not actually programmed by Atari; it was done at GCC, like a lot of Atari's other arcade ports (such as Vanguard, Galaxian, Dig Dug, etc).

 

Viewed objectively, 2600 Pac-Man isn't really that bad of a translation of Pac-Man, certainly not as bad as its reputation would suggest. All the gameplay elements are there, the graphics are low-resolution but serviceable, and if you're willing to accept the idea of sprite flicker, even the shimmering ghosts are tolerable (they're ghosts, after all). I'll admit that the sound effects can be grating after a while (like a lot of other 2600 games which don't get nearly as many complaints), but they're certainly distinctive: over the years, they must have been used hundreds of times in movies, television shows, and commercials.